TSSU Contract Committee Update
Facing the Management
by your bargaining team
After three meetings, management has finally given us a concrete reason for their opposition to our proposal on workload reviews for lab work. Up until today, Dario Nonis argued that adding "or labs" was unnecessarily complicating the collective agreement. When we dismissed this concern as ridiculous, he used a typo on our proposal to shut down debate on the matter. When we refused to be bullied on this point, the administration came back and admitted that having labs reviewed in the same manner as tutorials would be problematic as some labs are already larger than 24 students (the number for an automatic tutorial review). The problem, they suggested, was that there would be automatic reviews every semester for a number of different labs. “Fair enough”, we said, “this is a negotiation - what should the number be”? Nonis facetiously replied, "Let’s make it 60 then?" Clearly management is not interested in having a meaningful discussion about what a lab workload review process should look like.
Back to the Bargaining Table
by your bargaining team
As many of you are well aware, our Collective Agreement expired on April 30th, 2004. TSSU and SFU Administration began negotiating the new Collective Agreement in June. Immediately, the Administration refused to renew, even just for the duration of bargaining, the letter which ensures we receive a tuition credit from the university once a semester. This seems to have been a sign of things to come. We continued to bargain all summer and signed off on most of the housekeeping issues we brought to the table. We also unloaded a ton of proposals, very few of which the administration has responded to with counter proposals. We took a hiatus at the beginning of September and returned to the table on October 28. The bargaining team is already frustrated by the lack of progress being made.
Currently, we are bargaining around the issues of workload review and time use guidelines, grievance language, Sessional issues and access to information. While our contract committee keeps making constructive member-driven suggestions to the Administration, they simply reject our requests. They refuse our attempts to clarify the current language and keep consistency throughout the Collective Agreement, leaving loopholes that could potentially be used to exploit our members. An example of this is adamantly rejecting our proposal to add the words ‘or lab’ to the clause concerning workload reviews, their sole rationale being that this makes the Collective Agreement an overly complicated document. Two words, five letters, too complicated. Can you understand our frustrations?
Presented by TSSU former Organizer
The University has offered us safety language to address personal security (dangerous students, etc.) According to the language signed, a TSSU member can refuse to teach but will be paid pay if s/he feels that a situation is unsafe, until such time as the University’s Personal Security Coordinator looks into the matter.
More housekeeping has been signed off on, and a clause allowing Departments to only post jobs electronically, if they so desire, has also been signed off on.
We are awaiting information on how the Childcare fund is administered.
We are awaiting information on how departments will handle International Student Social Insurance Numbers.
The University felt that there was no need to add a clause that states: “The University will exercise its rights in a fair and reasonable manner.” Their position is that it’s too hard to define what ‘fair and reasonable’ is. Our argument was that these are legal terms with a long history of jurisprudence and case law behind their use, and that the University is meant to be treating us fairly and reasonably already, so there shouldn’t be a problem with including this in the Collective Agreement.
July 7, 2004
Presented by TSSU former Organizer
The TSSU began negotiations on June 11, 2004. Administration has agreed to pursue an accelerated bargaining schedule, and we will be doing as much bargaining as possible over the summer.
Administration has not agreed to renew the expired tuition credit agreement. Their position is that renewing the letter would be equivalent to giving us a raise as negotiations begin. This is false: they are in fact giving us a cut in compensation as negotiations begin. Also, $30.00 per student from this fund comes from money that was negotiated by TSSU in 1999 in lieu of a pay increase.
Administration has refused to recognize non-credit language instructors at Harbour Centre as TSSU members, preferring to go through a drawn-out and costly certification and grievance procedure instead of settling matters quickly.
Several minor letters of agreement and housekeeping issues have been signed off on.
Administration seems willing to allow more money from the TSSU Childcare Bursary fund of $50,000 per year to go towards our members. Our position is that, since provincial government cuts to the provincial childcare subsidy were implemented in February, need for this program has drastically increased. There will be little if any money left in the fund to distribute as a tuition credit regardless of any changes made to the program.
Administration wishes to remove the MSP and related benefits and replace them with ‘payment in lieu of.’ This would result in insignificant raises in pay for membership at the expense of students, particularly international students, who do not qualify for provincial medical assistance.